September 29, 2007

They certainly didn't make it easy on themselves, but the Chicago Cubs, my favorite team, finally clinched the National League Central Division championship a couple hours ago. Now, my hands-on experience with baseball was limited to a brief and abysmal Little League career; nonetheless, honesty and the ghost of my North Sider grandfather compel me to trumpet my own not insignificant part in this championship. For it was on June 28th, on this very blog, that it was revealed that the Cubs' main competition down the stretch, the Milwaukee Brewers, were doomed.

If you recall, the discussion concerned Milwaukee's long-time classical music radio station WFMR, which the owners had decided, after more than 50 years, to switch to a—shudder—smooth-jazz format. At the time, I tried to caution against the dire consequences of such a move:

You Milwaukeeans should be more careful with your civic institutions: the Brewers are having their best season since 1982. The last thing they need is a curse.

Did WFMR's management heed this warning and amend their easy-listening ways? No. The result? In the three months since, the then-first-place Brewers have gone a dismal 35-46, coughing up a 7½-game lead, surrendering the division to the Cubs. The Cubs, mind you. Anger not the gods of classical music.

(I should mention that I have no particular animus towards Brewers fans, who I remember as being an unusually discerning lot. The last time I saw the team was in 1998, when some brothers and sisters and I journeyed to old Miller Park for a Cubs-Brewers contest, hoping to fill up on bratwurst and beer before they tore the place down. This was late in the Sammy Sosa-Mark McGwire modern-medical-miracle home-run chase; needless to say, everyone was on their feet whenever Sosa came up to bat. But the highlight of the game was when Mickey Morandini, a veteran infielder who had come over to the Cubs from the Phillies, I think, beat out an infield single with a head-first slide. The crowd went bananas, demonstrating that, far from succumbing to the louche blandishments of the long ball, they remained connoisseurs of the true National League style of play.)

In order to promote the spread of Cub Fever (WARNING: Cub Fever is hazardous to your health), here's a few musical souvenirs of the last time the Cubs won the World Series—that would be 1908, thanks for asking—that I found deep within the online bowels of the Library of Congress.

First is "The Glory of the Cubs," dedicated to the "World's Champion Base Ball Team"—a somewhat pedestrian number (sample lyric: "That's why I'm going to sing this song to you / For I know it is true / The Cubs have won the champion game," etc., etc.) mainly notable for being a comparatively unsyncopated effort from Arthur Marshall, one of the early masters of ragtime. A protégé of Scott Joplin, Marshall wrote some of the best rags in the older, folk-like Missouri style, so I won't begrudge him cashing in on a topical novelty. Obligatory inside Cubs joke: hey, that bear on the cover throws a lot like Trachsel, doesn't he?

Next we have "Cubs on Parade," a march and two-step by the otherwise unknown H.R. Hempel. The publisher's name would seem to indicate that the piece originated from Chicago's significant German immigrant population, who provided the meat-packed foundation for that most sublime of culinary delights, the Chicago hot dog. This one is cool because the scan is actually of a full set of parts for a theatre-pit-sized orchestra. Plus, the bear winding up in the box there would be an absolutely righteous bit of tattoo flash, wouldn't it? If they go all the way, I'm seriously considering it.

And finally, this oddity: "Between You and Me," a non-baseball-related love song credited to Johnny Evers and Joe Tinker, two-thirds of the most famous double-play combination in baseball history. Highly unlikely—Tinker and Evers hated each other, as a result of Evers abandoning his teammates in a hotel lobby and taking a cab for himself on one 1905 occasion. The two didn't speak to each other for the next 23 years, including the championship 1908 season. I think we chalk this one up to some enterprise on the part of the publisher, Will Rossiter (another significant name in the world of ragtime, by the way: at one time or another, he published works by most of the style's leading exponents).

Anyway, depending on how many tie-breakers the rest of the Senior Circuit needs to sort everything out, I should get about a week's reprieve before this team starts giving me daily angina again. Hey, for a Cub fan, that's like a lifetime.

September 28, 2007

I don't believe people when they say "I don't understand this music, will you explain it to me?". It means they don't understand themselves and the place they occupy in the world, and that it doesn't occur to them that music is also a product of collective life. Sometimes I have a strange feeling that musical processes can be more intelligent than the people who produce and listen to them; that the cells of those processes, like the chromosomes of a genetic code, can be more intelligent than the perceptive organs that should be making sense of them. It's as if the music were miming one of the most incredible of natural processes: the passage from inanimate to animate life, from molecular to organic forms, from an abstract and immobile dimension to a vital and expressive one.

September 27, 2007

With the exception of a distant summer spent almost exclusively on the Massachusetts Turnpike, I've never been much of an audio-book guy. But now that books are coming out in audio-only format, I might have to listen. First up is a new thriller conceived by Jeffery Deaver and written by a round-robin of mystery authors. The title? The Chopin Manuscript.

"The Chopin Manuscript" is the tale of a former British war-crimes investigator and musicologist who comes across a rare manuscript by 19th century composer Frederic Chopin that was buried by the Nazis during World War II. Murder and mayhem naturally ensue.

Naturally. (I love the war-crimes/musicology combo. I imagine a dashing academic nailing a witness at Nuremberg with a subtle explication of watermark discrepancies on variant manuscripts of the Horst-Wessel-Lied.) One gets the feeling that Chopin is replacing Beethoven as pop-culture's go-to classical reference.

We're Running Out Of Media To Plunder Dept.: the musical-comedy adaptation of the TV show "Happy Days" continues apace, helmed by ubiquitous 70s tunesmith Paul Williams:

The biggest challenge, Williams says, was finding a way to make Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli sing. "He's such a cool guy, how do you get him to open up to his concerns and fears and sing?" he asks.

The answer was found in two words: Pinky Tuscadero.

Funny, I was expecting "Frederic Chopin." Anyway, if I'm going to see a TV-inspired musical, Neal Fox's "Thank You, Dan Rather" sounds a lot more fun. (Although a well-placed comma in this headline could make for a really interesting show.)

September 26, 2007

Even if you were able to exorcise the demonic, mythical Historical Arrow of Musical Progress from the bargain Amityville Dutch colonial of your thought process, there would still remain the almost unbreakable habit of considering the appearance of new musical styles and vocabularies to be responses to whatever immediately preceded them. You know the drill: Classicism cut through the ornamental profusion of the Baroque era, Romanticism rejected the objective rationalism of Classicism, atonality dissolved late Romanticism's anachronistic adherence to tonal-based structures, Minimalism was a reaction against the dissonance of atonality. And so on.

This pattern, of giving equal billing to what each style is not, in comparison with its predecessor, as what it is, has always vaguely bugged me, even as I deployed it myself. Being simply a negation of previous practice, it seems to me, wouldn't inspire the profound and often joyous creativity that accompanied most of these movements. (As a benchmark, compare with political thought: did anti-Communism ever strike you as a particularly rich intellectual playground? Anti-Zionism? Making fun of the French? Well, maybe that last one.) And yet, all those turnovers of the musical odometer were contrasts, breaking with the previous generation in crucial ways.

I think there's a more interesting way to think about this, related to a pattern found perhaps most notably in 19th-century history. One of the main undercurrents of Victorian thought in England, for example, was the steady erosion of religious dogma by rational science. It's around the 1850s and 60s that this particular wave crests, and writers and thinkers begin to seriously propose atheism, as profound a negation as you could come up with at that time. Needless to say, mainstream Victorians were horrified by the atheists in their midst, but what really puzzled them was that the heathens were so happy, even giddy, about the prospect of a godless universe; as Charlotte Brontë remarked, "The strangest thing is, that we are called on to rejoice over this hopeless blank." Or as the theistic Thomas Carlyle wrote in his journal, "An immense development of Atheism is dearly proceeding, and at a rapid rate, and in joyful exultant humour."

But what brought the atheists such joy was not the absence of a benevolent deity, but the way denying His existence cleared away an entire philosophical bramble-patch in one stroke. In his vital study The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870, the late Wellesley professor Walter E. Houghton put it this way, commenting on the above Carlyle quote:

In [Carlyle's] fear of materialism he forgot the release it could bring from the weary and frustrating effort to reconcile religion and science.... Accept it, wrote John Morley, with his own experience in mind (the trying struggle to maintain his Christianity, followed by the happy conversion to agnosticism), and "the active energies are not [any longer] paralysed by the possibilities of enfeebling doubt, nor the reason drawn down and stultified by apprehension lest its methods should discredit a document, or its inferences clash with a dogma, or its light flash unseasonably on a mystery." The mind is freed from the whole pressure, social and personal, to think within a traditional context which has become incredible.

In other words, the need to work around the question disappears, because the question itself becomes meaningless. The radical Victorians squeezed the elephant in the room out the door, and were thrilled to discover how much space it freed up for new furniture.

If we look at epochs in the history of classical music in this light, not what each movement cast aside from the previous one, but what seemingly intractable aesthetic argument it rendered moot, you can start to understand the infusion of energy with each turn of the wheel. Atonality isn't a casting aside of tonality, but a slice through the Gordian knot of trying to reconcile an increasingly dissonant vocabulary with formal structures built around consonance. Minimalism isn't a throwback reaction to serialist dogma, but but a way to cast aside the seeming incompatibility of the intuitive rhetoric of triadic tonality with the deteministic processes of the 12-tone method. Because of the nature of music, this sort of thinking doesn't necessarily imply any progressive timeline, either: there are still composers who find that the inherent conflicts in Romanticism, or serialism, or what have you, provide the appropriate drama for their expressive goals. But for other composers, such questions only crowd the table, and need to be swept aside.

This way of thinking can help explain supposed musical revolutions that don't, in retrospect, seem all that revolutionary. Neoclassicism, for example, at the remove of the better part of a century, often sounds tame and hermetic compared with other musical currents between the wars. But as an effort to work through classical music's perennial wrestling between the push for innovation and the veneration of the past, it fits the pattern nicely. The idea also reveals distant mirrors: both the 14th-century ars nova and current post-minimalism can in part be seen as a dissolution of the supposed boundary between art and vernacular musics.

Historical upheaval fans will no doubt by now be thinking that I'm promulgating a view of music history as a series of quasi-Hegelian dialectics. They're right, to a point. But it's a good way to get a sense of what Hegel and those who appropriated Hegel's ideas were really after. The caricature of the dialectic is a boiling-down of every historical or philosophical pattern to two concepts in conflict with each other—depending on the caricature, either one concept inevitably prevails, or the two are mashed up into a crude "synthesis." But the real Hegelian process is finding what the fundamental, intractable, unresolvable problems of a situation are, and then figuring how to change the situation so such problems cease to be an issue. That's what Marx—the most famous, and infamous, disciple of the dialectic—tried to do. It's what the Victorian atheists tried to do. It's what composers have periodically tried to do throughout history.

And it's why all those 19th-century revolutionaries had such consistent and, for the most part, unwarranted optimism, the old conflicts melting away to nothing, a clear, wide path seemingly open in front of them. The socialists saw their revolution founder on the shoals of human nature, but music, happily, lives in a parallel universe of unlimited, unhindered possibility. The Romantics, the futurists, the minimalists, they all felt revolutionary euphoria, for the same reason that revolutionaries do—but composers push to new dialectic syntheses in a forum far more amenable to them than the world of politics and money. Utopias can't survive in everyday life, but in art, they continually sprout anew, a lush, perennial garden.

I had this thing drafted out before I saw Phil's "Dial M" post on, among other things, utopian visions in popular music. You know what they say: one of us, it's a crackpot theory—two of us, it's a movement!

September 24, 2007

"Bodacious," huh? No, I don't write the headlines. I would imagine the more accurate bit of 80s argot would be "fresh." Still, I always liked "bodacious" because I could imagine its etymology to be improbably but appropriately descended from "Boadicea."

September 21, 2007

[Leonard] Bernstein came from a family of Talmudic scholars, but was only moderately observant in his adult years. However, Bernstein would hire a taxicab for Yom Kippur and go around Manhattan "shul-hopping." He did this because he loved to hear many different cantors' interpretations of the traditional prayers.

Bernstein knew, of course, that riding was forbidden on the holiday, so he would have the cab driver drop him off a block away from each synagogue so that synagogue-goers would not see the famous conductor riding on the holiday.

September 20, 2007

More videos? Yeah, it's that kind of week. But this one is pretty fun—an Italian newsreel covering opening night of the Metropolitan Opera's 1938 production of Verdi's Otello. Backstage footage of Lawrence Tibbett (Iago), Giovanni Martinelli (Otello) and Maria Caniglia (Desdemona), along with glimpses of the thoroughly old-school costumes and staging.

The Met's 1938 Otello was recorded for broadcast.* You can hear Tibbett sing the "Brindisi" here, with Nicolas Massue as Cassio and Giovanni Paltrinieri as Roderigo. Ettore Panizza conducts.

September 18, 2007

Here's the most pleasantly warped version of West Side Story's "Tonight" that you'll see all day:

The 1985 short, directed by Terry Miller, was nominated for a Student Academy Award, and for a while, was an appropriate prelude to midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at Chicago's Music Box Theater. (Miller, who's made lots of comedy shorts with the likes of Andy Richter and David Koechner without ever quite hitting the big time himself, never got any royalties from those showings—the Bernstein family, as he relates in this 2000 profile, denied him the rights to use the song.) As a bonus, if you look closely, you can spot some long-gone minor Chicago landmarks—the Nortown Theater, George Diamond's Steak House, and the North Side Magikist sign.

September 14, 2007

Having made my notes and outlined my scenario, all I had to do was set to work. At the time, I was in Cairo, the guest of His Highness Mohammed Ali, Pasha of Egypt, the Khedive's brother. I was in the enjoyment of complete liberty and of a calm undisturbed by visitors. These had probably been scared away by the guard of the palace gate, huge fellows in gorgeous costumes and formidably armed.

I cannot possibly say how I found the first musical phrase to which I subsequently adapted the line:

Des astres de la nuit tes yeux ont la clarté!

I had reached this point when the director of the Khedive's theatre conceived the idea of giving a grand concert on behalf of the sailors of Brittany and of composing it entirely from my works.

Suddenly I found myself plunged into a round of rehearsals, compelled to take my own part in this solemnity. All this was incompatible with work that was in its initial critical stage. Regretfully I gave up "Hélène," and when, later on, I wished to take it up again, it was quite impossible. I was bewildered, out of tune so to speak. I had to quit my delightful abode in Cairo and proceed to the middle of the desert into the Thiebaid of Ismailia—a refuge of light and silence—for what one is pleased to call "inspiration."

Ismailia, the favorite sojourn of the Prince of Arenberg, is a heavenly spot. It is a beata solitudo inhabited by a number of highly civilised people of both sexes employed by the Suez Canal administration, a small though choice colony which included poets of no mean talent! And as these kindly folk are very busy, they people the solitude without disturbing it.

In twelve days I had written my poem. Then I set sail at Port Said for Paris, where preparations were in progress for a revival of "Henry VIII" at the Opéra. Once this was over, I was quite tired out; my "composing machine" would not work any longer and I needed a week at Biarritz and another at Cannes to recover. Then I remembered that Aix-en-Savoie was close to a flower-decked mountain, surrounded by a wonderful panorama and easy of access. Soon I found myself installed on Mount Revard where I sketched out almost the whole of the music of "Hélène" to be completed subsequently in Paris.

It is thus that one should always work, in calm and silence, far from importunate visitors and distractions of various kinds, soothed by the glorious sights of nature and the odours of flowers.

September 13, 2007

If you're a really honest composer, then you know that the question isn't so much whether or not you'd give up a body part to write an earworm as indelible as the theme from Chariots of Fire, but rather, how many, and which ones. So, if worse comes to worse, do the right thing, and offer Vangelis a place to crash. The composer of that iconic beach-jogging soundtrack (not to mention Blade Runner, Missing, and a bunch of stuff that was recycled for the Carl Sagan series Cosmos) is in danger of having his house torn down by the Greek government.

Greece's Culture Minister signed a decree allowing the demolition of a historical landmark in central Athens to improve the view for a new museum a stone's throw from the Parthenon, the ministry said on Wednesday.

Despite protests from conservationists, minister George Voulgarakis signed a decree allowing the demolition of an art deco building and a neo-classical property owned by the Oscar-award winning composer Vangelis.

The Bernard Tschumi-designed New Acropolis Museum is now scheduled to open early next year. You might ask why the house needs to be razed at this late date, given that it could have been easily accounted for in the museum's design. (And, apparently, was: the second photo down on Tschumi's page, those buildings in the model? One of those is Vangelis's house.) Then again, keep in mind that there's a gallery devoted specifically to the Parthenon marbles, and, um, those are all still in Britain. Anyway, the government's claim that the houses are blocking the view from the museum seems to be hogwash—you can see photos of the actual site here, and scroll down for interior construction views that show the Acropolis in plain view.

The government might have a better case if Vangelis had used his Hollywood millions to build a new, ostentatious monstrosity. But here's the kicker—the house is itself a designated landmark. It's actually two houses—one dating from 1908, and one from 1930—and both were listed as works of art by the same Culture Ministry that's now trying to get rid of them. The whole thing seems rather shady—news of the minister's decision didn't make it to the papers for almost two weeks, and just ahead of Greek elections, scheduled for Sunday. Culture Minister Georgios Voulgarakis, of the currently ruling center-right New Democratic party, is relatively new in the post, having been more-or-less demoted from the job of Public Order Minister in February on the heels of a phone-tapping scandal (apparently, they get more worked up about that sort of thing in Greece than over here).

Vangelis would probably land on his feet—his latest project is scoring a new biopic of El Greco—but, just in case, Evanghelos, there's a spare bedroom for you here at Soho the Dog HQ. Framingham, Massachusetts, isn't exactly the center of the universe, but on the other hand, you'd probably never have to pay for your drinks over at The Aegean.

September 12, 2007

I've long since given up on arguing with anything Greg Sandow says—classical music isn't dying, pop music is no longer the singular cultural behemoth he thinks it is, and why does he still bother writing about classical music when it's clear that, in spite of his frequent "some of my best friends are classical works" protestations, he doesn't seem to like classical music that much, anyway? If what you really love is pop music, that's great—enjoy it. But then don't try and... oh, wait—that's right, I gave up arguing.

Verdi might have been a great composer, but through no fault of his own he lived in the 19th century, and in Don Carlo he shows us the Spanish royal court as the 19th century might have imagined it, formal, a little stilted, and full of aristocrats who (apart from the leading characters) sing anonymously as members of a chorus. You really can't do that any more.

Well, of course Verdi's aristocrats are formal and stilted, because that's the whole bloody point of the opera. It's a tragedy because the characters who survive only do so because, seduced by power, they've sacrificed their humanity and replaced it with the stilted, artificial rules of the court. The characters who perish are crushed by the machinery of the state, the formality of which stifles moral conscience and sympathy. (If you think that Verdi couldn't create an aristocrat that wasn't formal and stilted, you have not made the acquaintance of the Duke of Mantua.) And you can't do what any more—invite the audience to put themselves in the place of characters from a completely different time and place and let them see how the drama might resonate in the contemporary world, let them experience the universality of the human condition? If you can't see how even the most resolutely period-costumed production of Don Carlos maybe just might have some pertinence to current political realities, then you're just plain obtuse.

Sandow frames this with an observation that the Errol Flynn picture Captain Blood has a pretty operatic vibe, but that movies aren't very operatic anymore, so opera is doomed.

[I]n 1935 you could go to the opera, and go to the movies, and see practically the same thing. So opera was close to everyday life, in a way that it just can't be now.

Now, either he's saying that Captain Blood was close to everyday life (everybody carried swords during the Great Depression?), or he's tacitly assuming that people in 1935 somehow found costume dramas less anachronistic than people do today. On the other hand, Hollywood cranks out just as many period pieces as it ever did, and people still go see them—and most of them aren't modern-reference mash-ups like Marie Antoinette, which Sandow holds up as pop-culture Exhibit A in his argument. Over the summer there was 300, Amazing Grace, and Becoming Jane. This week's box office champ is a period western, 3:10 to Yuma. There was a well-received Edith Piaf biopic and a poorly-received Molière biopic.

Culture is always going to reference any point along the historical continuum it can get its hands on. Captain Blood was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar in 1935. The other nominees included film versions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Les Miserables; the Astaire-Rogers musical Top Hat, as well as Broadway Melody of 1936; the Charles Laughton Wild West comedy Ruggles of Red Gap and John Ford's searing drama of the 1922 Irish rebellion, The Informer. In other words, old, new, and everything in between. Sandow is pointing to 1935 as some lost era of confluence, but, living in 1935, cherry-picking my cinematic experiences, I could make the exact same argument he makes today. It would have been specious then, and it's specious now.

I caught snippets of New York City's 9/11 commemoration on the radio yesterday. As part of the ceremonies, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus sang the National Anthem. Interestingly, they sang it with four beats to the bar.

"The Star-Spangled Banner" is more or less officially in three-quarter time. Printed sources of "The Anacreontic Song," the drinking song that supplied the tune, are in triple meter, as are other, pre-"Banner" songs that use the tune (such as "Adams and Liberty"). Here's the traditional version:

The Brooklyn kids sang something more like this:

Basically, each downbeat is doubled in length. What it does is make the anthem sound like a gospel song.

Spreading a dactylic rhythm over four beats like this shifts the rhythmic activity to the second half of the bar, which is common in gospel music. Here's the opening Richard Smallwood's contemporary gospel standard "Total Praise," which has the same three-stretched-into-four (or even eight) pattern:

It's prevalent enough that it's an easy way to give a piece a gospel feel, as in Billy Taylor's "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free," made famous by Nina Simone:

Long-short-short and related patterns are pretty venerable, so how did the pattern become associated with gospel? One might think it's through comparison with white gospel, which has always kept a healthy repertoire of waltz-time numbers—shifting to 4/4 doubles the backbeat quotient and makes for a more jazz-like rhythm. But I think it has more to do with the call-and-response pattern typical of African-American churches: the long downbeat opens up space in the bar for the choir/congregation to interject. Here's a good example from John W. Work's American Negro Songs:

I'd be willing to bet that the common-time, gospel-tinged variant of "The Star-Spangled Banner" has its origin in the African-American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, but the first such public performance I know of was José Feliciano's soulful prelude to the fifth game of the 1968 World Series. (The famous Jimi Hendrix Woodstock anthem was in a solid slow three.) At the time, Feliciano's version was widely regarded as disrespectful; within two decades, Marvin Gaye's 1983 NBA All-Star Game rendition was an instant classic. Nowadays, at one of the most solemnity-fraught public observances on the calendar, a 4/4 "Star-Spangled Banner" doesn't even raise an eyebrow.

There's a lot of reasons why. Part of it is the prevalence of pop styles in the current American musical landscape—those hippie teenagers from '68 are now running the place, after all. You could argue that genres, by now, have criss-crossed so many boundaries that the mere use or implication of a style doesn't say much of anything vis-à-vis the song at hand (Gaye was singing soul, which was secularized gospel, which in turn was churchified jazz, which evolved from ragtime and blues, which grew out of spirituals, etc., etc.). I think there's two particular things going on here, though.

The first is that our expectations for patriotic feelings have changed. In a way, the National Anthem has shifted in performance to a sort of national hymn. (Francis Scott Key's original poem does reference the Deity, but not in the only verse that anyone knows.) Of course, there already is a national hymn: "God of Our Fathers," composed in 1888, and as stolid a piece of white Anglo-Saxon imperial Gilded-Age triumphalism as you'd expect, just the thing for reinforcing traditional American values of rectitutde and propriety. But such dignified piety paled in comparison with the heady energies of the African-American church, an experience that was firmly installed in the mainstream by the civil rights movement. Once we saw the view from that mountaintop, it became the ideal inspirational touchstone. We didn't just want the comfort of tradition and heritage. We wanted to be transported.

A fundamentalist straw man might argue that we're looking for a replacement for those religious facets of governmental ceremony that have allegedly been leeched out of public discourse by civil libertarians. (I don't think so.) A cynical straw man might say that we want the spiritual uplift of religion without the corresponding responsibility, so we've shifted those tropes to a non-religious context. (Maybe.) I would say that there's a more fundamental change at work here, a change in the way we perceive what "country" means. Stephen Decatur's infamous 1816 toast—"Our country, right or wrong!"—comes across as less jingoistic if you consider that Decatur's idea of his country was his camaraderie with his fellow countrymen: we may disagree, he was saying, but our collective bond as citizens should never be dissolved. We don't think of it that way today; our "country" is an ideal, a set of beliefs about government and freedom, a goal to be reached through collective conscientious citizenship.

Why do we think this way? It gets us into all kinds of trouble. If we clearly viewed our country as simply an assemblage of people living on a certain parcel of land surrounded by a border, I doubt we would be stuck in Iraq, for one thing—we wouldn't have seen the need to go there in the first place. But since we also see the country as this dream of liberty, this beacon of democracy for the entire world, we're less likely to notice such cognitive dissonance until it's too late. What's more, as time goes on, we're more and more likely to concentrate on that idealized country. Decatur and his fellow Americans thought that the perfect society envisioned by the founding fathers was imminent, just a few constitutional and economic adjustments away. We know better, which makes that goal all the more seductive in its permanent elusiveness. The great joy and tragedy of the American experience is that perfection always seems so close that you can almost, but not quite, reach out and grasp it.

The bulk of the Negro spiritual repertoire is focused in some way on the transition from this world to the next. Flipping through Work's collection, there's "After 'While":

After 'while, after 'whileSome sweet day after 'whileI'm goin' up to see my Jesus,O some sweet day after 'while.

"You May Bury Me in the East":

You may bury me in the East,You may bury me in the West,But I'll hear that trumpet soundIn-a that morning.

"Lead Me to the Rock":

As I go down the stream of time(Lead me to the Rock that is higher than I)I leave this sinful world behind(Lead me to the Rock that is higher than I.)

...and so on. Heaven, in other words, is within sight, just over Jordan, which makes the consummation even more devoutly wished. No wonder our paens to our just-out-of-reach ideal country seem to evolve towards millenial religious utterance.

Perhaps that's reading too much into things, but I think that the transformation of "The Star-Spangled Banner" into a gospel song, at the very least, signals another wish: the wish for a country worth singing a hymn to, the wish that the nation will finally cross over into the promised land that each of us carries in our mind. The longer the trip takes, the more we try and bolster our spirits. We sing to encourage ourselves, and our country, that we and she will get there someday. In the words of another spiritual: we cheer the weary traveler.

September 11, 2007

The enemy was at the gates, guns thundered all around, and grenades sizzled through the air amid showers of sparks. The townsfolk, their faces white with fear, ran into their houses; the deserted streets rang with the sound of horses' hooves, as mounted patrols galloped past and with curses drove the remaining soldiers into their redoubts. But Ludwig sat in his little back room, completely absorbed and lost in the wonderful, brightly coloured world of fantasy that unfolded before him at the piano. He had just completed a symphony, in which he had striven to capture in written notation all the resonances of his innermost soul; the work sought, like Beethoven's compositions of that type, to speak in heavenly language of the glorious wonders of that far, romantic realm in which we swoon away in inexpressible yearning; indeed it sought, like one of those wonders, itself to penetrate our narrow, paltry lives, and with sublime siren voices tempt forth its willing victims. Then his landlady came into the room, upbraiding him and asking how he could simply play the piano through all that anguish and distress, and whether he wanted to get himself shot dead in his garrett. Ludwig did not quite follow the woman's drift, until with a sudden crash a shell carried away part of the roof and shattered the window panes. Screaming and wailing the landlady ran down the stairs, while Ludwig seized the dearest thing he now possessed, the score of his symphony, and hurried after her down to the cellar.

Here the entire household was gathered. In a quite untypical fit of largesse the wine-seller who lived downstairs had made available a few dozen bottles of his best wine, and the women, fretting and fussing but as always anxiously concerned with physical sustenance and comfort, filled their sewing-baskets with tasty morsels from the pantry. They ate, they drank, and their agitation and distress were soon transformed into that agreeable state in which we seek and fancy we find security in neighbourly companionship; that state in which all the petty airs and graces which propriety teaches are subsumed, as it were, into the great round danced to the irresistable beat of fate's iron fist.

September 10, 2007

Over the weekend, my lovely wife and I, always ready to extend a welcome to new arrivals in the neighborhood, dropped by a big addition just added to the Natick Mall—sorry, The Natick Collection—apparently, the word "mall" now carries too much of a whiff of the lumpenproletariat for luxe-minded shoppers. Anyway, as Veblenesque theme parks go, it's not bad: bright and airy, shiny continental techno music emanating from the high-end designer boutiques and hovering just at the threshhold of audibility, etc., etc. Can I afford anything in the new places? Nope. But if you're the type who's been worried that a dearth of opportunities to spend four figures on a handbag has somehow made Metrowest Boston incurably provincial, worry no more.

Right in the middle of the place, M. Steinert & Sons, who, as they never fail to remind you, are New England's exclusive representative for Steinway & Sons pianos, had plunked down a big new nine-foot Steinway "D."

Apparently, there was a professional serenading the patrons at the grand opening, but when we were there, the only players heard were passing children, availing themselves of the opportunity to tickle the polymer-based fake ivories until their parents became sufficiently incensed at their dilatoriness. Some of them weren't bad, actually, sending forth the burnished tones of their beginning repertoire with anti-establishment glee. A closer look at the instrument revealed that the kids were in good company:

That frame's been autographed by Peter Serkin! Which probably means that, at some point, he played this instrument—or else one of his stage door fans is Mr. Universe. As a tribute, I added a few half-remembered bars of Schoenberg to the fray before once again leaving the proceedings in the hands of the younger generation. Now, if this open-keyboard thing is a permanent fixture, and the ambience is always going to be graced by kids randomly plinking away, that would actually be a big draw for me. If that's the case, though, maybe they should find an instrument signed by David Tudor.

September 07, 2007

With forty years in filmmaking—and thirty since the powerhouse duo of The French Connection and The Exorcist—how does Friedkin, whose prolific career has been characterized by huge ups and downs, classic hits and costly flops, keep his passion? "I just love doing it," he says flatly. "It's like [composer Gustav] Mahler, who wrote ten symphonies and none of them were successful, but he just kept writing them. Now there's not an orchestra in the world that doesn't have to program Mahler."

I confess that I've always liked Friedkin for doing his best to actually be the rampaging egomaniac that people imagine all Hollywood directors are. The comparison does raise an interesting question, though: is there a correspondence between Mahler's symphonic output and Friedkin's cinematic oeuvre? Does the First Symphony reveal new facets placed side-by-side with Sonny & Cher in Good Times? Are the hammer blows in the Sixth the nitro-laden truck in Sorcerer or the reviews of Cruising? And what of the long-lost link between the Eighth Symphony and The Exorcist? Susan McClary could have a field day with this.

Friedkin's career has alternated between brilliant and awful (sometimes in the same movie), but he's never dull, and really, anyone whose CV includes The French Connection—one of the all-time great, brainy thrill rides in any medium—is entitled to a certain amount of cockiness. Friedkin's recent forays into opera direction have gotten mixed reviews, but you know there's a doozy of a production in that brain somewhere. If I were in Peter Gelb's chair, I'd be lining up Friedkin, Coppola, Scorsese, and Ken Russell for a mini-season at the Met.

September 06, 2007

Pavarotti was (is, thanks to the recorded legacy) my favorite tenor, and I've been trying to remember how and why that came about. I only saw him live once, in a Chicago Symphony concert performance of Otello of which all I remember is he was rather under the weather—by the time I started going to the opera, Ardis Krainik had issued her famous ukase in Chicago, so I missed out on any stage performances. (My parents did get to see his Duca di Montova on one of the occasions he didn't cancel.) In my undergrad days, I was a big Jon Vickers fan, as his style was a better fit for undergrad intellectual iconoclasm. But at some point in the past ten years, Pavarotti took the crown. I think it was because he had some God-given immunity to my opera-fan nitpicking—even a mediocre performance still had that glorious sound and that generous presence, which, for some reason, made me just not care so much about the other stuff, and reminded me just what it is about opera that I love, anyway.

The clip above, from 1988, has it all—the full-out sound, the dictation-worthy diction (see, guys? When I talk about fast, crisp consonants and pure vowels, that's what I'm talking about), the rhythmic swagger. Opera Chic has more great clips, and La Cieca posts a marvelous 1969 Nemorino that gives you a sense of what had everybody buzzing when he first appeared. (And I can't resist linking to his final performance, opening the 2006 Torino Olympics with—what else?—"Nessun dorma." Still damn impressive for a septugenarian, and I just love that the crowd knows to fill in the chorus part.)

Just the other night, my lovely wife and I were talking about Pavarotti (the Rigoletto with Sutherland was on the stereo) and we were saying that a voice like that only comes along every fifty years, and trying to figure out who would have been the Pavarotti of the previous generation, and who was around today who might step into that role. But really, has there ever been another voice like Pavarotti's? I wonder.

September 05, 2007

David Bowie in particular had associations with almost all of these people at various points, through either producing their records or otherwise collaborating. He was the connector, rock's greatest dilettante, forever chasing the next edge, always moving on. More than anyone else, it was Bowie who was the touchstone inspiration for postpunk's ethos of perpetual change.

Until I read that, I had never thought of Bowie as a sort of pop/rock Erik Satie, but it's not a bad comparison. Bowie/Satie was the inspiration for a generation of younger musicians looking to move past what they saw as the dead end of Romanticism/Wagnerianism/punk nihilism/American rockism. A nice historical analogy to fill out your collection.

Except for that word dilettante, that is. I've heard Satie called both an opportunist and a purposefully willful eccentric, but never a dilettante—to use the conventional terminology, Satie found his voice and stuck to it, no matter what musical or literary movement he was associating with. He avoided the D-word on account of his stylistic consistency.

Bowie, on the other hand—I don't think Reynolds is using the term in a perjorative way here, but it certainly was a criticism against Bowie throughout his career. When I first became a fan (the early 80s, around the time of Let's Dance), it was the fourth or fifth new Bowie of the past ten years, a tally that would easily double if you went all the way back to "Space Oddity." For me, his ability to sense each shift in the pop-culture wind—stadium rock, blue-eyed soul, electronica, pop nostalgia—and come up with a record that both encapsulated and commented on it was uncanny, intriguing, and not a little bit witty. For a lot of people, though, it felt like a con, that if you stripped away all the adopted stylistic layers, there was nothing at the core.

Etymology-as-argument has its pitfalls, but in the case of dilettante, it makes an interesting point. The word entered the language from Italian ("delighting in") in the early 18th century, largely as a compliment (much like the original use of the word amateur). The negative use doesn't come about until the 19th century—in other words, on the heels of Romanticism. The Romantic idea that artistic expression that broke with established traditions or models was still valid if it was an honest reflection of the creator's soul was, perhaps inevitably, flipped around—art that played around with traditions or imitative models was perceived as somehow less honest and valid.

I studied composition with possibly the most Bowie-esque of modern composers, Lukas Foss (who just turned 85, by the way—happy birthday!). Foss could also adopt each new vocabulary—open-prairie Americana, serialism, aleatoricism, minimalism—with deceptive ease, but I always felt that the bandwagoneer potshots rather missed the point. Each new style was, for Foss, an opportunity to demonstrate that the novelty was only on the surface, to show how each innovation fit into the great tradition of Western music, the universal artistic goals shared over the centuries. It's something that reaches back to his heroes, Bach and Mozart, the paragons of pre-Romantic composition, both of whom saw part of their job as being attuned to every next big thing.

We like to think that the era of stylistic battles is over, but the idea of different styles as a compositional resource in and of itself, rather than the end result of an artistic concept, still strikes a lot of people as too shallow, too meta-whatever, too clever by half. (Not just in music, either—take, for example, James Wood, the New Yorker's new book reviewer, whose career has been in large part marked by the conviction that stylistic promiscuity almost inevitably interferes with artistic expression.) Even I have my limits on post-modern hijinks, but the Bernstein Mass or the funhouse of Sondheim's Assassins or, more recently, Steven Mackey's Dreamhouse, to name but three examples, are all works whose power and depth are because of their stylistic variety, not in spite of it. Part of it is the paradoxical nature of the mask, how wearing one can free you up to display more of yourself. But I think part of it is also the implicit recognition of the audience, that adopting a stylistic pose carries with it the expectation of a listener who will recognize it, making the energy flow outward rather than inward. Bowie himself put it this way in "Who Can I Be Now?", a 1974 rarity:

If it's all a vast creationPutting on a face that's newSomeone has to see, a role for him and meSomeone might as well be you.

September 04, 2007

A handful of amuses-doigts for the new month. The last one originally had a literary-referential title that I thought was pretty clever, but I found myself getting annoyed that I couldn't come up with names for the other three, so I just dropped the appellation. (Why not just leave only one piece titled, you ask? I dunno.) Anybody who can guess what it was wins a free beer the next time they're in Boston.

September 02, 2007

Jeremy Eichler has a terrific piece in today's Boston Globe on the late Soviet composer-bureaucrat Tikhon Khrennikov that goes beyond his common (and not undeserved) reputation as a party enforcer to show the fascinating, infuriating, tricky personality of a formidable political survivor. Essential reading on the intersection of power, expression, and human nature.

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The First Four Notes

Matthew's book, tracing the long, sometimes unlikely, and frequently absurd progress of the iconic opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony through history. Order from IndieBound, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble.